DDN Powers Big Data, Big Research for Purdue University

DataDirect Networks announced that Purdue University has deployed 6.4 Petabytes of its SFA storage to help accelerate access to multidisciplinary research being carried out.

The Purdue campus hosts three supercomputers on the Top500 list, a large academic distributed computing grid, and one of the largest collections of science and medical online hubs. To accommodate storage needs of up to 1,000 researchers working on several hundred concurrent research projects, Purdue implemented a robust data repository called the Data Depot, powered by DDN storage.

DDN said Data Depot was implemented with a pair of DDN SFA12KX storage systems with SFX and 6.4 PB of raw capacity. DDN's SFX software extends storage cache with solid-state memory, which Purdue research infrastructure architect Mike Shuey said delivered "a 900 percent improvement in read capability at a low cost, while enabling us to access millions of small files on dedicated solid-state modules, while continuing to stream very large data files simultaneously."

DDN said that by pre-loading data into solid-state storage, Purdue has been able to realize the performance benefits of flash storage for handling big data sets at a price point that’s closer to lower-cost high-density hard disk drives.

"The challenge of managing varied research needs is accommodating both very large parallel I/O jobs and millions of small, random read requests without imposing performance penalties on anyone," Shuey noted. "With DDN’s scalable storage platform and SFX technology, we can sustain the highest levels of performance for all researchers by supporting all types of workloads at the same time."